The field of the disclosure herein relates generally to contingency analysis and, more specifically, to systems and methods for use in presenting contingency analysis results for a utility network.
Contingency analysis (CA) is often used to analyze a system that may be exposed to one or more possible occurrences (sometimes referred to as contingencies) to determine how such occurrences may impact the system and/or one or more components of the system. Although CA results may indicate undesirable impacts to the system or component(s) of the system under one or more contingencies, such results may be used to control or modify the system in an attempt to avoid or minimize such undesirable outcomes. For example, in the context of utility networks, CA is commonly used to analyze contingencies affecting transmission elements (e.g., transmission lines, buses, breakers, transformers, etc.) and to determine how the network may be impacted by one or more contingencies relating to such elements. Unless control and monitoring of a system is fully automated, CA results typically need to be presented (e.g., displayed, printed, etc.) to a human operator or monitor of the system.
At least some known systems present an operator with a matrix based representation of CA results. In such displays, rows of the matrix generally represent contingencies, and columns of the matrix represent elements of the utility network. Some other known systems present CA results on a two dimensional (2D) representation of the network, such as a one-line diagram, in which the size or color of elements impacted by one or more contingency is changed relative to the other elements. Other known systems describe three dimensional (3D) visualizations of CA results data on a 3D representation of the system analyzed.
However, in known systems, presentation of the CA results may be confusing and/or incomplete. For example, some matrix displays may lack visual feedback of transmission elements. Moreover, at least some known matrices do not correlate the CA results to geographical information. The proposed 2D and 3D representations of CA results are often confusing and difficult for an operator to comprehend.